White Columns White Rooms: Cynthia Rettig / Kevin Cooley – by NY Arts

White Columns White Rooms: Cynthia Rettig / Kevin Cooley

by NY Arts

Cynthia Rettig presents photographs from the series "Family Outing." These photographs document her family’s weekend and summer vacations at a remote spot at Lake Mohave on the Arizona/Nevada border. In addition to more commonplace activities like boating and swimming, the primary vacation pastimes favored by Rettig’s family are gunplay, target practice and trap shooting. In clusters of images, Rettig explores the beauty of the bucolic landscape, her family’s ease with weapons, and the effect of their actions on their surroundings. She has been photographing her family at this site since 1973. Based in San Francisco, Rettig holds a BFA and a MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. This will be her first solo exhibition.

Kevin Cooley presents photographs from the series "Night for Night." These photographs depict outdoor nighttime landscapes taken in close proximity to movie and television shoots (the series title is a term used in the film industry for shooting on location at night). The bright lights used in after hours production fill the night sky with an eerie, synthetic illumination. These images capture a gray area in which the fantasy and artifice of Hollywood overlaps with ordinary reality. Similar to Rettig, Cooley seeks to question what separates public from private domain, personal from shared experience, and examine the remnants of human action. Cooley lives in Brooklyn and holds a MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. This will be Cooley’s first solo exhibition. He will have a two-person show at Momenta, opening late November 2002

These White Room exhibitions will run concurrently with "Cheap," curated by Lauren Ross and Elizabeth Ferguson Madden in the main gallery.

White Rooms are solo exhibitions for artists unaffiliated with a New York City commercial gallery. The White Room program, started in 1983, introduces the work of unknown artists to the public and gives participating artists an opportunity to show work free from the pressures of the commercial market. In its twenty year history, the White Room program has identified and helped launch the careers of some of the country’s most significant artists. Among the artists who had a White Room early in their careers are John Currin, Glenn Ligon, Jack Pierson, and more recently, Sarah Sze, Rachel Feinstein, and Jessica Craig-Martin.